Ecommerce SEO

Our core specialty is SEO and SEO for ecommerce sites. We have worked with all types of sites on a number of ecommerce platforms including WooCommerce, Volusion, BigCommerce, Ultracart and more.

What You Need To Know About SEO For Ecommerce Sites

There are several important factors when it comes to SEO and ecommerce. The first is the hierarchical structure of the pages, meaning your navigation and your category / sub-category structure. Some sites go too deep and some too shallow or some are not not well organized. In an ecommerce site your category pages are the best pages for SEO and targeting the the keyword of what you are selling in that category. So these are the most crucial pages to get right to rank in Google.

The other hurdle is then picking what categories to optimize. Each category takes time and effort to research to find the best keywords. We have to look at how people are searching for that product or service and who your competitors are in the top ten to make sure it’s a realistic goal to rank for the terms we pick. So here we typically start with what is most important for you to rank and sell, followed by what categories have the most search volume. If you have hundreds of categories this can help to set an order of which categories get optimized first.

Optimizing your categories properly for SEO may also mean needing to rename your products. This not only helps your products to rank for their own specific searches but helps to support the optimization of each category.

We have helped hundreds of ecommerce sites to rank in Toronto, nationwide and globally. Larger stores we have helped rank for hundreds of keywords by optimizing the categories properly. Why not contact us for a free analysis and see what we can do for your store!

OUR SEO PROCESS

Below outlines our SEO steps and the work is the same for those wanting local results in Toronto, national results in Canada or global rankings.

1. Initial Discussion

We will work with you to understand your business, your goals, your audience and whether you are looking for local results here in Toronto and other cities around the GTA or if you want to reach nationally or globally. We’ll also work with you to understand which categories or products of your e-commerce site are most important so we focus on those first.

2. Initial Assessment

We will assess your site and look for any issues it may have that will impede rankings such as old code, mobile friendliness and the more important and most common issue with e-commerce sites which is hierarchical page structure. Your site needs to be organized and clean but also not too deep by having sub-sub-sub-sub categories for instance. Which can also impact URL structure.

3. Keyword to Page Mapping

We will perform full keyword research for your site as a whole but also for categories, subcategories and in some case maybe even products of your e-commerce site. We can determine local Toronto search levels but also province-wide, national and international volumes too if your market expands beyond Toronto.

4. On-Page Optimization

Once the keywords have been approved we will then work on optimizing your pages, your e-commerce categories and sub-categories and products if needed. Normally products don’t rank for much more than a direct product search but in some cases, there is search volume that can make optimizing a product worthwhile. We will also make sure your site is clear to talk about where you sell your products and if you have a brick and mortar store here in Toronto but sell outside of Toronto or even nationally.

5. Content Optimization

E-commerce SEO and content optimization have some different rules when it comes to Google. Because you can be selling the same products as Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart you can have the same product level content such as descriptions and specifications without it being deemed carbon copied content. But many e-commerce sites fall short with making sure the product naming helps support the keywords targeted in a category and also to have a category level description with enough content to satisfy Google. We will help find the balance and makes sure your e-commerce categories have the right content to succeed.

6. Monthly SEO Work and Reporting

Monthly SEO work includes setting up and monitoring the XML sitemap, monitoring for broken links (since the content on e-commerce sites changes more often than a regular informational website), the building of quality inbound links and much more. We will also provide you with a monthly report tracking the keywords optimized and a traffic report so you can easily see how it’s impacting site traffic.